1GAM January Postmortem


January is in the rear view mirror and I'm happy to say I completed a game. Sure there's no art. And it's short. But it plays as I had hoped when I put the design to paper a few weeks ago. There's still plenty of room for improvement and refinement. But let's leave that for another post.

First off, I'm surprised I finished. Sure it's not polished but the main game mechanic is present which is more than I can say for anything other solo projects. When my programmer friends were committing to doing #1GAM, I told them I'd try it but focus on the game design rather than putting together a prototype or a finished product. With a wedding in the works, a fiancée to support and an RPG campaign to run, I just didn't see a lot of time left over for #1GAM.

It took a few weeks for the idea to come to me. But it took almost as long to actually get to work on a prototype. I'm a perfectionist and so when I picked up a book, Game Programming Patterns. I ended up devoting time to reading that and then forcing myself to try to apply the lessons I learned. This led to a bunch of wheel spinning over the past two weeks until I just tossed it all out and committed to making a prototype work.

While I tried to toss all the lessons aside, I ended up rewriting the entire codebase Friday night and Saturday on the last weekend of January. My code still isn't perfect but it's a lot cleaner than it was before the rewrite. Also, it's setup better for improvement and maintainability in the future. By Sunday afternoon, I had everything back in place and to a minimum playable prototype.

So what does the future hold for my January #1GAM? Likely some further refinements and additions. Even with the calendar turning, I expect I won't have a genius idea strike me for February's #1GAM until a week or so. I need to expand the available games and guests. I'd like to add some difficulty and settings sliders. Oh, and art. Maybe one day.